Hi all,
Well, I’m taking the plunge into hosting my own installation of WordPress. None of this “one-click” stuff for me. No sir. I wget’ed a tarball to my web host, config’d it to talk to my MySQL database (um… did that… once or twice), and now there’s an almost-exact replica of this blog at http://www.protocolostomy.com
This post, of course, is not replicated 
Also, the theme I use here is not replicated, because I can’t find the darn thing!! S’ok, though. I’m having fun browsing through all of the themes out there for WordPress.
Why am I doing this? Well, in short, WordPress.com is unable to let me (or anyone else) have per-post widgets (to my knowledge – if this isn’t true please enlighten me!). For example, I’ve been wanting to use the AddThis button, or something like it, for a long time. The button makes it a lot cleaner for me to add social bookmarking links to each post (you can see the button on the new blog) – this is much cleaner than adding 50 href tags to my post manually every time I post (yes, that’s how WordPress.com users are getting around this limitation – by hand). In addition, I registered for an addthis.com account, so I can log in and see not only what articles eyeballs are landing on, but which ones they’re actually finding interesting enough to bookmark.
DISCLAIMER: I recently took a job with AddThis. However, it’s still true that I was looking for something like this long before I knew what AddThis was. Also, my working there doesn’t really buy me much. I’m using the same WordPress plugin as anyone else who hosts their own WordPress installation. I get the same stats and stuff… unless I find another interesting database query that’ll give me more, in which case it’ll be rolled into the product and made available, so I’ll *still* be running the same code as everyone else 
